It’s simple. If we can’t change our economic system, our number’s up by George Monbiot

Comment by Carrie Bowes:

This article by George Monbiot in the Guardian is a powerful attack on the economic growth consensus held, without question, by all the main parties apart from the Green Party. What he doesn’t raise, is potential solutions to our reliance on growth and fossil fuels, given the political will; a political will which is sadly lacking currently. It looks like we can’t save the west Antarctic ice sheet, the collapse of which is seen as inevitable by scientists (with resulting sea rises in about a thousand years of up to 4 metres). However, there would still be much that could be done to stop the loss of other species, destruction of ecosystems and ultimately ourselves, if we were able to challenge the growth consensus. A brief illustration of potential solutions, some of which have already been stated on this blog (and which also can be greatly expanded on) is included after the article, below.

It’s simple. If we can’t change our economic system, our number’s up by George Monbiot

It’s the great taboo of our age – and the inability to discuss the pursuit of perpetual growth will prove humanity’s undoing

Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham.

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It’s 2.5 billion billion solar systems. It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.

To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues miraculously vanished, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.

Economic growth is an artefact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal or horse power required by industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not be sustained. But coal broke this cycle and enabled – for a few hundred years – the phenomenon we now call sustained growth.

It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and pathologies (total war, the unprecedented concentration of global wealth, planetary destruction) of the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. The meta-trend, the mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now, with the accessible reserves exhausted, we must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain our impossible proposition.

The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious, will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.

Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180% in 10 years. The trade bodyForest Industries tells us that “global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow”. If, in the digital age, we won’t reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?

Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set the pace for global consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller? Their houses? Their artworks? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish, rare stone? Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. By unremarked accretions, ever more of the surface of the planet is used to extract, manufacture and store things we don’t need. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that fantasies about colonising space – which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them – have resurfaced.

As the philosopher Michael Rowan points out, the inevitabilities of compound growth mean that if last year’s predicted global growth rate for 2014 (3.1%) is sustained, even if we miraculously reduced the consumption of raw materials by 90%, we delay the inevitable by just 75 years. Efficiency solves nothing while growth continues.

The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result, they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st century’s great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle-class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.

Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of mention. That’s how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.

Given the political will, and the will of the people, one solution provided by the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) is in reducing our demand for energy in the West (by 60% in the UK) alongside the elimination of fossil fuel use. A model of how this would look in the UK is illustrated in their ZeroCarbonBritain2030 report which demonstrates that it CAN be done without going back to the Stone Age, or “the lights going out”.

A change in our economic system could involve the transition to a steady state economy. This could be supported by citizen’s income or basic income, which would protect us from the the effects of zero growth, provide security, and enough to cover basic needs. It would also remove the stigma associated with claiming benefits, as well as removing obstacles to work. Citizen’s income is part of Green Party economic policy and will be included in the Green Party 2015 manifesto. We also have policies to reform the monetary system and the banks, explanation of which I will leave to a future contributor in an upcoming blog.

At a global level, many of these solutions acknowledge our need to be fair to poorer people and poorer countries; the CAT model takes into account our historical responsibility as an industrial nation; estimating an energy budget which would allow greater flexibility to poorer countries who have been left behind. The Green Party has a policy called “contraction and convergence” which basically means that rich countries would be encouraged to consume less, and be given a smaller budget for CO2, allowing poor countries to develop and consume more, until everyone is at a similar level. However we need not fear that we will ourselves be reduced to poverty. In the context of reaching a sustainable level globally, Patrick Curry, author of “Ecological Ethics” says:

“In principle, there would be no need to choose between social injustice and ecological suicide if the wealthy minority [those in the West, other than people living in poverty or on lower incomes – my words] were to reduce their consumption – and only to a level which would still enable a reasonably comfortable “European lifestyle” (at the modest end of the spectrum) while the majority increase theirs enough to permit the same”.

However, as George Monbiot argues, we need to start by recognising the problem. Until we do, little progress will be made in discussing solutions and avoiding devastating actions of Ecocide, as described in the article, with consequences on humanity as well.